Posted
by
timothy
on Friday November 19, 2010 @03:26AM
from the gesticulate-wildly dept.

holy_calamity writes "Tech Review discusses how it will soon be possible to pay in stores by waving your cellphone over a contactless reader, thanks to new handsets due next year, and RFID stickers and cases offered today by firms including Visa. It's convenient for shoppers, but a major driver of the technology is the opportunity for retailers to gain access to their customers' cellphones and social networks for marketing purposes."

The night club offers its VIP clients the opportunity to have a syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms that not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks.

This sort of thing is handy for a beach club where bikinis and board shorts are the uniform and carrying a wallet or purse is really not practical.

And the blackhat standing by the exit door with a 50$ RFID-reader gets my account as well.

I work at a company who works on the cellphone side of the thing. It's been part of the specs since the first drafts that transfers require a manual validation (press a button) to occur. Did you really think you were the first to think of that.

Or you just put in an activation button, or put a password on each transaction, or put a password on certain transactions (to short time between, or too large amount, or in the wrong GPS area or whatever you can think off).

Personally I agree though that if you make it too convenient to use it will be easy to attack. So you have to make it less convenient to use (need to hold button on phone while swiping and need to type password if amount is over 20 USD etc.) and then suddenly you have a system that is only marginally better than a chip+pin solution.

Good thin about electronic money is that they are traceable, so if a badguy steals your electronic money at least he will be caught (not that that helps you if he's a destitute yunkie). The bad thing is that the goverment (and probably private companies) will have a perfect paper trail of your life.

Personally I don't see the point of just having a dumb RFID chip in me, I'd rather have some smarter tech with some kind of user interface (preferably something a bit more "Ghost in the shell" and not just a keyboard implanted in one wrist and a monitor in the other).

As for religious objections, you're free not to get cyberized (to use a word from GitS) and although I may find your reason for it silly I would probably also refuse simply getting a "dumb" implant that does little more than act as a glorified ID card.

The "no way you can have it done from your pocket" only applies for zero gain antennas. The black hat standing at the exit point, or better yet, in the van some meters away with a high gain parabolic antenna would tend to disagree.

It sounds to me that you're implying that the bible quote is somehow an accurate prediction of the future. I'm having a bit of trouble believing in that. Even if it becomes extremely common (which I doubt).

Also, it's a quote from a collection of fairy tales several thousand years old, hardly an accurate prediction of technological progress or world events.

It's ridiculous what kind of information people will willingly give up for the sake of social networking novelty.

Personally I find the narcissism of social networking *far* more ridiculous than the "giving up information part".

Though I imagine the two are linked - "I know I'm not important enough for anyone to give a shit about me, but maybe if I tell the whole world everything I do, I can pretend they all want to know, and the conclude that I'm actually giving something up by broadcasting everything from what's on TV to the consistency of my stool".

Please reply to what the GP actually posted. Their bible quote points out that eventually *everyone* will have to have the "mark" to do transactions. There eventually will be no opting out. You're better off not replying if you aren't going to read what the person whote that you are replying directly to.

Let's assume Bible to be inerrant. Let's also assume that this particular quote was meant as a prediction of future events thousands of years away; there's a pretty strong argument that the whole Book of Revelation was written as a thinly-disguised "fuck you" to the Roman Empire, who had a habit of putting their rulers portraits on their money (so you'd have to take the "image of the beast" into your hand to conduct transactions) and requiring worship of said rulers, and had a ruler (Nero) who had just died but was rumored to be alive and about to return, was commonly considered a beast, and who's name can be read as "666" by a common numerological method of the time, but let's ignore all that.

Even with these assumptions, your argument is illogical. There is no reason to assume that RFID tags really are the fulfilment of a particular prophecy, just because they could be. You certainly can't assume that they are, then use that to "disprove" any counterarguments, for that is begging the question. The GP pointed out that RFID tags seem unlikely to go the way the Mark of the Beast is supposed to; that's evidence that RFID tags are not, in fact, Mark of the Beast, not that they are MotB and a miracle will enforce all the conditionals.

This is why religious arguments usually get modded down: even if you assume that said religion is correct, the arguments themselves tend to be one logical fallacy on top of another, and often completely incoherent.

I didn't even have to finish reading the synopsis here before clearly thinking:

Not A Chance In Hell

Geez...I don't want identifying RFID's on my tires, clothes, credit cards or passports, why the fsck would I want them for my phone and to actively contribute to corporations data stores on me and my habits?

Exactly. The "mark" fear is based on the idea that a lot of Romans of non-proper birth were locked out of markets and opportunity. It was John's way of saying "Hey, they'll do this to all of us! Down with the Emperor! Christ will come in our lifetime, shut down the Emperor and save us."

Didn't exactly come to pass, but like Nostradamous or whomever, the emotionally unbalanced and credulous hold up these writings as accurate and simply reinterpret everything to fit modern history. When I was a kid Revelation fit in "perfect" with the Iranian revolution and with the lineage of European royal families. Now we're projecting onto RFIDs and IT. In 2050 we'll be projecting onto jetpacks and the founding of Saudi-Israel. Humans are just dumb irrational animals. Religion is proof of this.